


Slow inch by inch

by Ruby_fruit



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Brief mention of past sexual abuse, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-10 01:08:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2005176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruby_fruit/pseuds/Ruby_fruit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snapshots where Derek has a family, then doesn't, then gets a little back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slow inch by inch

Derek is born in the dog days of summer, July pouring heat through the open windows as he slides from Talia's body, howling healthily and outraged. Talia's mother tsks at him and growls, low and comforting as she cleans him off, thick old claws slicing neatly through the umbilical cord. Talia leans her head back on Ian's shoulder and her husband gathers her hair back gently, kisses her bare shoulder. 

"Well done then, love." 

Her muscles spasm, the natural effects of birthing fighting with werewolf healing. Talia feels every stretched muscle and ligament with brutal clarity; she leans her head back against Ian's shoulder, all the fragile human power of him against her back.

"I could kill you."

He laughs, and it shakes her. Talia snarls at him, snarls her way through the passing of the afterbirth and Ian soothes her, warm, calloused hands and his breath on the back of her neck. He never was afraid of her. She leaves her head on Ian's shoulder for a long minute afterwards, breathing, relieved and alone in her body for the first time in nine months. 

Derek fusses and Johanna presses him into Talia's arms, scolding, "Feed him! Don't get lazy now." 

Talia opens one eye, watches her mother's bent back descend the stairs with the afterbirth to bury.

"Do you think Johanna's noticed she's not alpha anymore yet?" Ian grins against her skin.

"Oh, honey," Talia says, adjusting her son's sturdy weight, brushing her fingers through his downy hair as she settles him against her breast.

"Johanna will be the alpha until she dies. She's a Hale. No formal power exchange was ever going to matter to her."

"I do hear the Hale women are remarkable." Ian shifts, gently adjusting her to get a better look at his son. Talia smiles, her fingers trailing over her son's tiny fists, clenched in his blanket. She presses her nose to his temple and breathes in what she's suspected her entire pregnancy. 

"Hello, my beautiful little wolf." She murmurs against the shell of his ear. Derek make an irritated noise and nurses on. Ian goes still behind her, his heartbeat ratcheting up.

" _Really_?" He says.

"Mhm." Talia turns her head and presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. "First boy since Peter." 

Ian's smile is stunning, wide and delighted, and he reaches careful hands around her to cup Derek's head, thumb smoothing over the wrinkled red brow.

Hale wolves are almost always women, they do not produce many boys with the gift. The last male Alpha of the Hale pack was so long ago Talia isn't even sure which generation he falls into. Peter is the only male born wolf living right now, and he's only living because Talia has a soft heart.

Except now there's Derek. Talia is charmed by his tiny, messy body, the rarity of form he represents. Derek, unaware of what he is, falls asleep in the middle of his first meal and fusses when Talia shifts him to a more comfortable position. He is crumpled, helpless, red and unattractive in the way of all newborns, with milk streaked down his chin and oh, she would tear throats out for him already.

 

Derek is four, and he loves books more than anything. There's a bookstore in Beacon Hills that Talia has been going to for ages, and she loves bringing him there, has brought him there since he was a little baby, dozing in the crook of her arm while she browsed the new books and the sale racks. The store smells good and familiar and and the old witch who owns it always has a cookie for Derek.

Which is why it's such a shock to pick up the timbre of a stranger talking to Derek, to wander over to where she left him in the children's section and see a Hunter talking to her baby boy. Not just a Hunter, an Argent. The rage is breathtaking.

Talia doesn't hurry over, she walks, breathing in the smell of blood under fragile human skin and listening to the racing of Chris Argent's heart as she approaches. He's not touching Derek which is very fortunate. Argent is just crouched near him, he’d been asking Derek about his book choice. Derek looks up nervously, he knows he's not supposed to talk to strangers. Derek is sweet, though, loves people and has better manners than his sisters did at his age. Talia may kill someone in front of him today, she’d had hoped to avoid that for as long as possible.

Argent moves back when she crouches by her son, this close he smells sour, like liquor and grief. Talia strokes her son's head and he grins at her, three little teeth missing. 

"Derek? Your daddy's right over there, why don't you go show him what you've got so far?" 

Talia waits quietly while Derek carefully stacks up his first round picks and trots over to his father, the heels of his sneakers lighting up red with every step. Once he's out of sight she stands and looks at Chris Argent. 

"Explain yourself."

Up close he’s bleary eyed, unshaven, on the other side of drunk, when he looks at her his upper lip wrinkles, disgust and contempt. Talia wishes, briefly, for Deucalion, she’s never had his grace when dealing with these people.

“Five of my men, _five_ of them dead and you just-”

He bites off the end of the sentence and she wonders what it was. Exist? Kept living? Talia holds on to detached curiosity, hides behind it as the rage cools a little. She wonder what he’s expecting her to feel over the deaths of hunters. 

(Nothing, nothing at all. She has killed mice with more feeling in her heart.)

“You killed an alpha and that leaves betas and omegas with no purpose but revenge. That your men died because they couldn’t clean up properly after they murdered someone is their fault, not ours.”

Leslie had been an older alpha, well into her sixties with a small, quiet pack. 

“You chose this life, you can’t turn around and be shocked when what you hunt fights back.” 

They’d lost three other hunters, they’d told her, bringing Leslie down. Even with an ambush. Talia is quietly, horribly proud of her for that.

“Those, those monsters, the ones who killed my men need to be brought to justice.” Argent says. 

Talia chokes down her laughter with sheer will, her eyebrows rising slowly. 

“You still haven’t explained what any of this has to do with me, or my son.”

“I know you’re hiding them!”

“Do you. Do you really believe I’m putting my family in danger by harboring a bunch of betas who just killed hunters?” 

Argent hesitates. He’s not a stupid man, nor as mad as his father-in-law is reputed to be, and Talia has a reputation for gentleness as well as power. It helps that she isn’t lying. The traumatized, wounded remains of Leslie’s pack are across the border by now. There has never been much of hunter presence in South America. Talia sighs, she cannot stand the smell of him any longer.

“We’re done. I’m not your problem, Argent, but come near my children again and I will be.”

She turns to leave and Argent grabs her arm. It’s the first surprising thing he's done if only because she hadn't thought he was quite that stupid. His grip is nothing, the long bones of his forearm crack like dry twigs under her hand. Chris Argent gasps and doubles over, his eyes wide and shocked. Talia almost laughs, this, _this_ ridiculous little ape is the eldest son of the Argent army. If she tightens her fingers and he will never use this arm again. A pull, a twist, and she could leave him in kinder pieces than he's left so many of her people.

Her son and her husband are two rows away, she is in her favorite bookstore in the middle of a beautiful day, in territory she must keep safe. Argent has broken enough of his own rules today that she doesn't particularly fear reprisal, but she cannot kill him. She won’t throw her family into war. Talia sighs, regret and bloodlust and tiredness, and she lets him go. She waits until he looks up at her, still hunched, waiting for the next blow. 

"Go home to your family, tend to your dead, and leave us be."

"So that's it?" He says, still curled over his arm.

Talia brushes the hair off his forehead so she can see his eyes, considers putting one out. 

"You might take a moment to be grateful that I have so much mercy left in me for you."

And she leaves him there. Her husband eyes her anxiously and she slips an arm around his waist, puts her nose against his temple and breathes in the comforting smell of him. Derek crowds against their legs and she scoops him up to hold between them as she listens to Argent stumble out the door. Derek’s heart is rabbiting anxiously in his little chest, Talia kisses his round cheeks and finds a smile for him. 

"You didn't do anything wrong, baby." She tells him, her eyes a bright, reassuring red behind the curtain of her hair.

Derek relaxes a little and his heart slows as his eyes shine gold through his lashes, the deep, instinctual trust in his pack an automatic comfort at this age. Talia buys him every book he picks that day and hopes he forgets everything else.

 

Derek is six and he's broken his arm. He broke it jumping off the porch roof because his cousin Ben - human, and all the wilder for it - dared him. Talia loves her family, but sometimes she wants to leave them all on the doorstep of a wolf sanctuary.

Derek is hiccuping tears, bewildered. He's used to the general childhood bumps and scrapes that heal up quickly, but the awful shock of that first broken bone is hard, even for a werewolf. Talia shouldn't coddle him, really. This would be the perfect time to teach Derek how to set his bones, to show him how much easier it is for his body to heal if it doesn't have to work the bone into place itself.

But Derek has his father's eyes, and right now they're full of tears. Talia has given Derek three sisters to protect him, she can afford to be soft with her little wolf of a son. She kneels down and gathers him close.

"Shh, it's okay, baby. It's just a broken bone." She strokes his head, holding the hurt arm, swollen and red, carefully still as he snuffles into her chest. 

"You can heal it just like a bruise, your body just isn't used to taking care of broken bones yet." 

Derek nods, chin quivering as he takes deep, steadying breaths.

"Now, I can help show the bone how to heal. Wanna see?" 

Derek nods, and Talia strips her dress off and blooms out of herself. The alpha form isn't a necessity, but Derek has always been delighted by it and it will distract him. He's already smiling damply, smelling red and sour with pain. Talia takes his arm carefully in her teeth, leeching off the pain as she press the bones together. There's a sympathetic throb of power behind her eyes and in her sinuses and in her son's bones. She is his alpha and his body will do as she wills. The bones knit under her teeth and the swelling eases. Talia licks his face, doggishly messy and he squeals and buries his face in her ruff, little hands patting her jaw. 

"That was the coolest, thank you mama."

Talia shifts, catches his hands in hers and kisses them.

"Yep, I'm the coolest mom. Now why don't you go clean up and we'll sit down and have a talk with Ben about why we don't jump off roofs?" 

Derek looks guilty and embarrassed, stops on the porch and dusts himself off carefully before going inside. Talia slips her dress back on and sighs, amused by the fast guilty thump of Ben's heart in the room above her. If he were a wolf she'd give him the same break Derek got and no help in healing it, but he's not, so someone is definitely grounded for a week. And she may nail his window shut before the little terror coaxes any of her other children out of it.

"You're too soft on the boy." Peter is leaning on the porch rail, smoking. 

Talia just looks at him until he shudders and turns away, shoulders hunching defensively and eyes a bright, brittle blue. She touches his shoulder gently as she goes inside. There's no true anger in her for him, there never really is. He is her little brother and she loves him but he always pushed too much as a child, always bigger than his place with a youngest child's sense of entitlement, and she supposes he's been pushed back too often. They get men like him sometimes, in the Hale line. Unfortunate, but nothing she can change, and she protects him too much as it is. Talia goes inside.

Derek is in a crowd of his sisters, Cora's chubby little body in his lap as he offers his still swollen arm for Laura and Alice's inspection. Laura ruffles his hair and calls him a dumbass, Derek leans back against her legs and breams up at her with open adoration.

 

Derek is twelve and training. He's a little young for it, soft-clawed and too used to following his sisters around like a pet to be comfortable fighting them, but he hates being left out. He's against Laura, Alice too old to be anything like a fair fight and already off for the day, and Cora too young for any of it, though she will happily run around the yard and throw herself, growling, at people's knees. 

Laura is good, reckless and a little too confident, but her form is solid and sure. Derek, well. He has potential, he'll be big one day, Talia thinks, and his form is good. But he just can't seem to bring himself to actually strike at his sister. Derek dodges an elbow, and takes a half-hearted swipe at an opening that should have let him lay his older sister out and Laura kicks his legs out from under him. Peter snorts, Talia sighs, and Cora flings herself onto the porch to bite Peter's pants leg. This isn't going to do either of them any good.

"Laura, Derek," Talia says, and watches the two dark heads snap up and focus on her, "you have my permission to use claws."

Laura grins, Derek gulps. He holds up a little better after that, still defending much more than attacking, but it's an improvement. Then Laura ducks an over-reaching swipe at her head and catches Derek right in his wide-open chest, her claws slicing from sternum to shoulder and Derek falls back with a scream that cracks into a roar. Laura freezes just long enough for Derek to lunge back up. He slams into Laura, coming up under her arm and bearing her down hard. 

Talias steps off the porch, intending to break it up before teeth get involved, she's surprised and pleased when there's no need. Derek has Laura down in a solid hold, and the scratches on his chest are raw but no longer bleeding. Talia slows and watches Derek mark her approach with the tilt of his head but keep his focus on his sister. He's grinning, wide and fanged and delighted.

"Say it."

Laura glares and tries to heave him off. She can't. "No!"

"Say it." Derek drags out the vowels obnoxiously, slurring a little around his teeth, and Talia rolls her eyes, quietly circling her children on the lawn.

Laura snarls furiously, embarrassed. Talia does not laugh, she remebers the first time she laid her older siblings out and she won't tease her daughter. At least, not right this moment.

"Fine, you win." 

Not the most gracious acquiescence but Derek takes it, leaning down to snap his teeth in her face before rolling off her with a wince, as if just remembering his torn chest.

Talia kneels beside them and Derek looks up at her nervously, eyes fading from gold to grey, biting his lip as the fangs recede. Talia smiles at him and he leans against her a little, hand pressed to his slowly healing shoulder. Laura scoots over when beckoned, bruised and irritated but fine, Talia takes her hand and presses it over the wounds she made in her brother's chest. Laura scrunches her face in concentration when she does this, but the black veins crawl smoothly up her arm and cluster briefly on her chest before fading away. When Laura opens her eyes the marks on Derek are closed, pink and shiny and Derek is has shifted to lean against his sister, looking a little dopey. Laura beams proudly at her mother over her little brother's head.

Sometimes Talia loves her children so much it hurts, a strange, deep, sweet ache in her chest. Talia doesn't really remember what she expected before her first child, or if she expected anything in particular but she doesn't think it was this, she doesn't think she could ever have predicted feeling like this.

She kisses both their heads as she stands. Derek high enough on the endorphin rush he doesn't remember he's supposed to be too old for this sort of thing. Talia ruffles his hair, touches Laura's cheek.

"Laura, you need to start thinking instead of swinging, you're stronger than Derek but you won't be stronger than everyone, okay? Derek, stop worrying about hurting your sister. That's why Peter and I are here. You're supposed to be learning to defend your pack, not being your big sister's punching bag."

Laura grins and pinches her brother's side and Derek squirms and swats at her. 

"Got it, mom."

"Yes mama." 

"Now get cleaned up, puppies, it's lunch time." 

On the porch Peters moved to the swing and has his toes on Cora's belly, rolling her chubby body around as she squeals and gnaws enthusiastically on his ankle. Talia collets her youngest and brushes at the dirt and grass and drool before sighing and stripping the sundress off her, depositing the squirming toddler in her Care Bear underpants inside the house.

"No bloodstains in the house!" Talia calls over her shoulder. 

Peter laughs softly and Derek grumbles as he strips off his ruined shirt and Talia pretends not to hear him call his sister a butthead. Talia stops at the door, she can hear her husband freeing their TV remote from Cora's depredations and the thunder of sneakered feet upstairs. For a moment she lets her family fill her senses, drowning out the deep, old hunger, the nemeton’s slow, constant seeking echoing down her bones.

 

Derek is sixteen and the only thing keeping him alive is Laura. Her power is new and raw and bought too soon at too high a price and she wields it like a bludgeon. Forces him to eat when he won’t, forces him to sleep. Tears his back to ribbons with her teeth when he gets his hands on wolfsbane and then burns it out of him.

Derek runs, she tracks him down and drags him three blocks by the scruff of his neck. They scream at each other, throats raw, healed, raw again. He tells her to kill him, because it feels like the least he can do, to strengthen her like that and doesn’t understand when she bursts into furious tears. When Laura comes at him he thinks she’s listening, but he comes to later, bandaged, his own bloody shirt pillowing his head, ravenous from healing. 

“Don’t ever say that to me again.” Laura says. 

Derek just stares at her, his eyes like Uncle Peter’s, murderer-blue and he can’t tell her, physically cannot say it, but she has to understand. She has to smell him, guilty-sour and sick. Laura’s eyes go red, she grabs his chin.

“I don’t care, Derek. You’re all I have left and I don’t give a fuck.” She bites each word off. “Whatever you did, whatever you think you did, I don’t care. You’re my baby brother. I’m not gonna kill you and I’m not gonna let you die, so we’re in this together now.”

Derek doesn’t believe her - can’t, she has no idea - but he holds on to it. They never stop fighting entirely, but Derek stops trying to leave her. 

It gets easier. The city helps. New York is very far and no one knows them, no one cares. Derek gets his GED, goes to college more for something to do than anything else. Laura job hops, buys a flashy car and tells Derek to sack up and get a real degree when he says he’s going for a Liberal Arts degree. He ends up with a BA in English with a focus on nineteenth century gothic horror. He likes it when terrible things happen that can’t touch anyone real.

Laura dates a lot, all human, all swiftly discarded. Because, she says “someone has to keep us from going all Flowers in the Attic in here” gesturing to the loft they share and laughing her big stupid laugh at Derek’s horrified face. Derek doesn’t date at all. The thought of it makes him ill, and there are still days when he can’t stand even Laura touching him. He gets a gym membership instead and discovers daily three hour workouts on top of running will shut down even a young werewolf’s libido. The clean blank of his mind is soothing as Derek turns his body into something Kate has never touched. 

 

Derek is twenty two, he has a degree, a low level editing job he has no real feelings about and no goals. 

“You look like hipster scum in that beanie.”

Laura drops into the seat that Derek has been keeping empty through sheer, silent force of unpleasant personality. Derek sips tea that’s gone cold and turns a page in his book, noisily, even though he’s not done reading it. Laura kicks her combat booted feet up on the edge of Derek’s seat, smearing cold, dirty sidewalk slush on Derek’s jeans. Derek twitches in irritation, but doesn’t look up at his sister.

“They found another deer, same mark on it’s side.”

Derek’s guts clench, go cold, the tea sits uneasily in him. He looks up at Laura.

“I’ve got to go back to Beacon Hills, Derek.”

He can’t make himself go with her. Two weeks later a part of Derek snaps and vanishes, he trashes their place and doesn’t remember doing it. 

 

Derek is twenty five and has been tired and afraid so long he can’t remember what it’s like not to be. He turns away from Isaac, Cora is leaning against the ugly Toyota he bought after the Alpha pack torched Laura’s Camaro. Her eyes track over his shoulder and she crosses her arms over her chest, chin lifting, lip lifting. Derek hears Isaac shuffle, then retreat.

“Where to, big brother?” 

Derek honestly doesn’t care. Anywhere but here. He tosses her the keys, loves her delighted grin. It’s a little mean, just like Laura’s. 

“Anywhere.” He says, “You pick.”

Derek’s asleep by the time they hit the highway, Cora’s fingers stroking restlessly through his hair.

**Author's Note:**

> > Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch  
> by inch America is giving itself  
> to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness  
> lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.  
> You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be  
> one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.  
> 
> 
> **Albert Goldbarth** , _The Sciences Sing a Lullaby_


End file.
